Flowchart This
Now and then (okay, all the time) when I have to do tech support for the parental unit, particularly when I have to do it over the phone or email, I wish I could make her fill out a flow chart of things so that I can work out what exactly the problem is. Otherwise what usually happens is something along the lines of:
“A window came up and says stuff but I didn’t know what that meant so I closed it. But now I can’t figure out how to get it back.”
“This thing keeps coming up and telling me to install it otherwise I’ll get viruses, should I do it?”[1]
“The lights are flashing but it isn’t coming on. How do I make it work?”
But I would probably be crucified if I tried to make mum lodge a bug or follow a flow-chart for troubleshooting, even though it’d make my life a hell of a lot easier[2].
And from time to time I get the idea in my head that I’ll do it. I’ll create a flow-chart and a manual with screenshots and everything and nice little annotations just like when I used to maintain the support pages for a certain ISP.
But then I realise that I would have to make sure she’ll read it. And use it, even though in her mind the easiest solution is to bug me. It’s what has happened before with written instructions for things like “How to attach files to an email”. I swear she has six copies of the same instructions and she has lost each one of them. And they were in notebooks. Once the instructions were right in front of her and she still called me over because it was just easier.
It also occurs to me that if I managed to create this all-purpose troubleshooting guide for parental units I could make millions selling it to other people like me and parents of other people like me. But then I also realise that the blood, sweat and tears to beta test such a solution is never going to be worth the financial gain.
So here I am, trying to figure out the hard way which bloody window for which godforsaken application it is that she lost and can’t get back.
[1] This one is always a worry, especially since Windows started doing lightboxing for errors and that means every dodgy site on the Internet has installed the lightbox javascript library to get people to install malware… Oh and the answer is always ‘No’.
[2] It doesn’t help that the work she does means that people install crap on her laptop and DISABLE THE ANTIVIRUS AND FIREWALL because their guys don’t know how to set access perms for the application in Norton so it doesn’t defecate itself every time she runs it. And even if you do add perms, any time the application does anything remotely peculiar, their first strategy is to disable Norton.[3]
[3] The easiest solution at this point would have been to walk into said application’s office with a sawn-off shotgun. But that would have been messy, so I installed a different anti-virus and firewall suite instead.
